[csaa-forum] Tony Bennett @ UQ WED

[Melissa Gregg]

Civic Laboratories: Museums/the Fabrication of Cultural
Objects/Self-Governance

Professor Tony Bennett - The Open University, UK
Wednesday July 14, 2.00pm-3.30pm
Seminar Room 402, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
4th Floor Forgan Smith Tower, St Lucia Campus, University of Queensland
- (Bldg 1)
Afternoon tea will be provided at the conclusion of the seminar

Subject
This lecture explores the value of thinking of museums as civic
laboratories, that is, as places where civic experiments are conducted
by means of the relations between people and objects that museum
arrangements effect and the forms of self-governance that such relations
makes possible.

Abstract
My purpose in this lecture is to explore the value of thinking of
museums as civic laboratories, that is, as places where civic
experiments are conducted by means of the relations between people and
objects that museum arrangements effect and the forms of self-governance
that such relations makes possible. In doing so, however, I also want to
draw on the role that the study of laboratory practices has played in
the related fields of science studies and actor network theory. I shall
be especially concerned here with the stress such work placed on the
need to study the relations between human and non-human actors in order
to understand the processes through which new scientific objects are
fabricated. This affords, when applied to museums, a means of
understanding their role in the fabrication of distinctive cultural
objects whose specificity consists in the particular kinds of work on
the self they make possible. By outlining the respects in which such
concerns might be integrated with those of governmentality theory, I
shall also outline the respects in which an adequate theoretical
engagement with the rebirth of the museum needs to depart from the
perspectives outlined in my earlier study The Birth of the Museum.

About the presenter
Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a
Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on
Socio-Cultural Change.   He was previously Professor of Cultural Studies
at Griffith University and Director of the Australian Key Centre for
Cultural and Media Policies.  His current interests focus on the
sociology of culture, with special reference to questions of culture and
governance, the history and theory of museums, cultural and media
policy, and relations of class, culture and social exclusion.  His
publications include Formalism and Marxism; Outside Literature; Bond and
Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (with Janet Woollacott);
The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics; Culture: A
Reformer's Science; Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures
(with Michael Emmison and John Frow); Culture in Australia: Policies,
Publics, Programs (co-edited with David Carter); Contemporary Culture
and Everyday Life (edited with Elizabeth Silva); and, most recently,
Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism.  He was elected to
membership of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998.



--
Melissa Gregg
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
4th Floor, Forgan Smith Tower
University of Queensland 4072
CRICOS provider number: 00025B



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